[Gothic 2 Out Of Memory
Amancio Mccrae
These are incredibly humorous, magical and symbolic photographs. A thought came into my mind when I was in the gallery surrounded by the work: for me they represented a vision of the Major Arcana of the Tarot (for example Jaguar Hombre could be seen as an inverted version of the Hanged Man with his foot in a figure four, the Hanged Man symbolising the need to just be in the world, yielding his mind and body to the Universal flow). The Major Arcana deal with the human condition, each card representing the joys and sorrows every man and woman can experience in a lifetime. In a way Stockdale offers us her own set of subversive Major Arcana, images that transgress the boundaries of the colonial vernacular, offering the viewer a chance to explore the heart of the quiet wild.
As you should know by now, this blog tries to promote the work of less well known artists and subject matter. So instead of concentrating on the wonderful aerial bushfire photographs of the well-known artist John Gollings (showing in the same gallery in different spaces with the work of Michael Norton) I have decided to do a posting on the exhibition Australian Gothic by Jane Brown.
One of the best photographs in the exhibition is Lathamstowe (2011, below). This dark, brooding, intense photograph is a beautifully realised visualisation, one that balances scale, tone, light, form and darkness to create a haunting image that stays with you a long time after you have seen it. This one images says it all: the artist has talent. More please!
Dr Marcus Bunyan is an Australian artist and writer. His art work explores the boundaries of identity and place. He curates Art Blart, art and cultural memory archive, which posts mainly photography exhibitions from around the world. He holds a Doctor of Philosophy from RMIT University, Melbourne, Master of Arts (Fine Art Photography) from RMIT University, and Master of Art Curatorship from the University of Melbourne.
Post-Soviet society is seriously ill with a partial amnesia that makes its historical memory strangely selective. There is no intellectual or political force that would make post-Soviet society face the issue of historical responsibility. The Soviet past is a history without memory.
How can we discover the consequences of historical amnesia? How can we employ customary historical methods to measure the impact of absent memory on contemporary Russian society? What kind of sources could reveal for us this hidden work of deformed memory that results in transformations of values, attitudes, customs and social relations?
Fiction is a particularly fruitful source for studying historical representations of the Stalinist past. As a genre, it addresses moral and aesthetic dilemmas; describes transformations of values, attitudes, customs and social relations; and provides access to the emotions and to the workings of the individual memory of its protagonists. Post-Soviet fiction, loaded with reminiscences of Soviet terror and atrocities, discloses the connection between suppressed memory and the emergence of new moral norms and social structures.
The specificity of post-Soviet fantasy as compared to its European or American counterpart consists in the fact that it reflects the transformations of post-Soviet society, in which Gothic aesthetics and Gothic morality have begun to generate specific social practices. Post-Soviet fiction represents with symbolic means contemporary selective amnesia. It reflects how Gothic morality and Gothic society are flourishing as a result of the experience of an unrepented criminal past.
The fact that humans can be treated as food for monsters is terrible but inevitable, horrifying and absurd, hints the author. However, neither this fact nor human behaviour under these conditions can be a matter of moral judgment. Morality is not applicable to nonhumans; hence, the behaviour of humans in their interaction with nonhumans cannot be morally biased.
Let us take, for example, the concept of feudalism. True, several social and economic practices of contemporary society (such as the privatization of state functions, the crisis of public institutions, the unprecedented role of personal relations in the social sphere, etc.) have a number of features in common with medieval society. Metaphorical comparisons of Soviet mores with feudal society were already fairly frequent in Soviet times and still are today. At the same time, the concept of feudalism indicates social and economic conditions that have absolutely nothing to do with contemporary society. These include relations between title and land ownership; the form of peasant dependence typical of rural society; the dominant role of religion; and so on.
The concept of feudalism inevitably evokes the image of a traditional society with a strong hierarchy, based on the nobility, privileges and land ownership. It connotes not only princesses and knights, tournaments and castles, but also a degree of technical backwardness that our contemporaries would find hard to imagine. In other words, the concept of feudalism can only compromise the worrisome diagnosis, unnecessarily violating the common sense that we are not returning to the Middle Ages. The most important similarities between our conditions and certain medieval practices lie not in the particular economic and social order reflected in the concept of feudalism. They reside in the aesthetic and moral transformations that are generated by gothic allusions.
Administrative positions as well as professions are considered personal family legacies to be transmitted from father to son, while an institution is perceived primarily as a source of personal fortune or a pseudo-feudal estate. Promotion based on personal relations and not on competition makes accident an important rule of gothic society. The process of political decision-making is limited to personal compromises among the bosses: university rectors, directors of enterprises, directors of oil companies, and so on.
Gothic society does not simply generate a social alternative to democracy: it profits from every loss of democracy. Gothic society has no respect for individuality or privacy, and openly contradicts the idea of human rights. Such social organization leaves no room for public politics and leads to the closing of the public sphere. It is no coincidence that, according to our opinion poll in 2007, 91 per cent and 84 per cent of respondents respectively think that the most important means for achieving a high social position or acquiring considerable personal fortune are social connections. A poll by the Levada Centre, meanwhile, shows that 75 per cent feel a deep mistrust for the police and more than 80 per cent believe that the police in their own city are corrupt.
What happens when the space for youthful aspiration caves in? When circumstances are extreme, can solace still be found in a daydream, a creative thought beyond the everyday? And what role might contemplative words have in crisis?
Writing is a known tool for healing trauma. And poetry lends itself to rapid responses under pressure. Forced into migrating to flee war, many Ukrainian women turn to the short form as a call of solidarity, a weapon and solace.
Dementia is a thief. It robs its victims piece by piece of their memory, identity, family and friends, and often enough even their human dignity. On their fourth full-length album, "Bleed, Memory" Los Angeles-based electronic experimentalists THIEF explore the theme of 'memory' both lyrically and musically, which runs as a bold dotted line throughout the album.
The solo project's mastermind, Dylan Neal, was largely inspired for this album after witnessing his father, who had recently been diagnosed with dementia, transition from bouts of forgetfulness and confusion to acute episodes of false memories, delusions, visions, and strange behaviour.
This makes "Bleed, Memory" a very personal creation and the experience has led Neal to question his own memories and explore how they shape his identity and reality. Memories are not just the stories we tell ourselves and others and this is evident in Neal's comparison of them to ghosts. Those have no corporal existence, yet scare those who believe in them.
Once again, the backbone of THIEF is made up of sampled sacred chant music. Some were sampled from crate digging, and some recorded at various orthodox churches. These samples got stretched, cut, mangled, morphed, and pitched to function like its own ethereal instrument. Neal deliberately designed "Bleed, Memory" to sound haunted. One of the techniques that he used to achieve this effect is 'granular synthesis'.
The more prominent use of granular synthesis on this record means that samples got split into small blips of audio, barely exceeding 100 milliseconds.
This unique approach, amalgamating musical elements from ambient, industrial, choral music, black metal, and trip-hop, among other influences, into a new sonic experience, has long granted THIEF a cult status among the initiated. Neal once more recorded and mixed most of the album in his apartment.
For the mastering he managed to win John Greenham again, whose collaborations include artists ranging from THE LOCUSTS and KATY PERRY to DEATH GRIPS, and who has received three Grammy Awards in 2019 that honoured his mastering for BILLIE EILISH.
With "Bleed, Memory", THIEF deliver a dark yet beautiful artistic contemplation of a terrible affliction that is at the same time conveying anger, melancholy, sorrow, and loss as a Gesamtkunstwerk (synthesis of all arts) lyrically, musically, and visually.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Mexican Gothic is a thoroughly enjoyable, thought-provoking novel. I want to discuss it around tea, preferably while in the mountains, preferably somewhere well-lit. I remember placing my bookmark in the book and thinking, I should not have read this before bed.
Reader, she does. The situation is more complicated and sinister than the initial fear of just a con artist husband isolating his new wife and convincing the world she's mad so he can steal her money.
795a8134c1